Basically this is going to be an ebay job. I am hoping to do networking and security at uni next year and want to build a dual CPU server to mess around on. There was a nice job lot for 2 Prestonia xeons with a mobo and RAM, but I got outbid. Budget for the entire build is around £200, i will build it round the CPU's as cheap as possible basically.

Few questions:

AMD vs Intel. Amd Opteron's of the same price are dual core. Are the older xeons better, or are you paying for the name? Xeons i am looking socket 603/604 and Opteron socket 940.

Any conflicts with running 2 cpus?

And, for the cheap server, Windows or Linux. I can get a copy of server 03 for free, for a newb which would be better to learn about how servers actually work, and I figure linux might run better on older equipment.

Bout covers it. Hardware compatibility i can deal with, I am more concerned with the software side of things. Any help will be much appreciated.

-Edit-
A quick cpu benckmark search show the AMD's perform better than xeons. Meaning it's just the name. Questions 2/3 still apply.Edited by BritishBob - 2/16/12 at 1:16pm

Seriously if you already have a rig capable of running a VM well do that, not only will you able to test just about any OS you need or can think of but it's just about the same as having a physical box. Less power use which for a student is always good.

Software side, server 2003 is great and robust place to start, once you know your way around AD and server tools etc and you feel comfortable in a windows server environment you can try server 2008 R2 if you are running on a 64bit machine.

You can also start to test out linux servers once you really get down into it just to see how they go. With a VM your options are unlimited.

One benefit I find is a I can make a snapshot then if I screw the server up, snapshot it back to a working state in minutes. Simple as that

the big benefit with a dedicated server box is you can get experience with something like ESXi or Citrix XenServer. I found it very informative installing a hypervisor and then managing everything from another system. It just depends on what you want to learn.

As above.
Seriously if you already have a rig capable of running a VM well do that, not only will you able to test just about any OS you need or can think of but it's just about the same as having a physical box. Less power use which for a student is always good.
Software side, server 2003 is great and robust place to start, once you know your way around AD and server tools etc and you feel comfortable in a windows server environment you can try server 2008 R2 if you are running on a 64bit machine.
You can also start to test out linux servers once you really get down into it just to see how they go. With a VM your options are unlimited.
One benefit I find is a I can make a snapshot then if I screw the server up, snapshot it back to a working state in minutes. Simple as that

Oh yeah forgot to mention VMWare snapshots :-) GREAT feature when you are tinkering about and prone to breaking things.

Also by starting out with VMWare and Windows Server, you are getting hands on experience with two extremely popular 'industry leading' technologies.

I guess thinking, one benefit would be with a true box / server would be the fact you can setup remoting in, firewalls, ports, routing etc.
You can play with dynamic dns and making it secure and using a vpn then remoting in. That can be great real world experience.
Just something to think about, not saying you can't do it with a VM or anything like that, but having the box gives you a sense of what it would be like to manage something remotely.
Just more ideas. Networking is something that you don't get into. It sucks you in and you never get out. It always gets deeper

Yeah like you say a physical box gives you a material 'real' sense... But considering all your VM's can be bridged onto the physical network and therefore act exactly the same as a physical box, you may as well do that. (Or run ESXi natively on the box)

I know what you are saying with networking lol.... Im kinda on the edge of a black hole with it.... I work as 3rd Line Infrastructure design & support on windows environments and networking hasn't sucked me in all the way yet but it keeps drawing me nearer and nearer

Another advantage that getting involved with virtualisation carries as well is that a lot of large scale systems are migrating to virtual "cloud" systems with high availability (VMWare vMotion & Hyper V Live Migration for example). The lack of reliable high availability solutions for VM's was the only thing holding it back... But now its coming along.... Its inevitable that massive physical infrastructures are going to be replaced with high density, high availability virtual solutions running on blades and more powerful, fewer boxes.

I personally find it to be really exciting stuff.Edited by The_Rocker - 2/16/12 at 3:48pm

I'm a level 2 - 3 network support officer. At the start of last year we had 30 vm's.

At the beginning of this year we are now upto over 100 VM's.

The best thing is not only do we have save time and money but the managing aspect is so much easier and greatly saves me time it's a no brainier for business. Having experience in Hyper-V and Vmware will be a great help on a resume especially if you know how to set one up and use it correctly.

We are only on the edge of what we are capable of. Wait until all we need is one host and 100 servers running off it. Sure we still need 5 racks for our 10Gig links to offsite links and our core and edge switches but the space and power we save is also great.